As explained in the previous section, storage engines implement data handling at the physical level. They handle the data files, the data, and the index caches if they exist, and whatever is necessary to efficiently manage and read the data.
The .frm
files are an exception. For each table, one .frm
file exists. These files contain the definition of the table, and are created and used by the server.
Using the SHOW ENGINES
statement or querying the information_schema.ENGINES
table, it is possible to see the available storage engines. The following output is obtained with a standard MariaDB 10.0.6 installation:
MariaDB [(none)]> SELECT ENGINE, SUPPORT FROM information_schema.ENGINES \G *************************** 1. row *************************** ...
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